Excel Workbooks and Worksheets
Excel Workbooks and Worksheets explains the difference between a workbook file and the individual sheets inside it, and how to manage those sheets.
Workbook vs. Worksheet
A workbook is the entire file you save, for example Budget.xlsx. Inside that one file, you can have several worksheets, each shown as a labeled tab at the bottom of the screen, such as Sheet1, Sheet2, and Sheet3. Worksheets let you split related data into separate pages instead of cramming everything into one giant grid.
- A new blank workbook in current versions of Excel opens with a single worksheet named Sheet1
- You can add as many additional worksheets as your computer's memory allows
- Each worksheet has its own grid of rows and columns, independent of the others
Adding, Renaming, and Deleting Sheets
- Click the circled plus (+) icon to the right of the sheet tabs to insert a new worksheet
- Double-click a sheet tab, or right-click it and choose Rename, to give it a clearer name
- Right-click a sheet tab and choose Delete to remove a worksheet you no longer need
Navigating Between Sheets
Click any sheet tab to switch to it. If a workbook has many sheets and not all the tabs fit on screen, right-click the small navigation arrows to the left of the tabs to see a full list, or use Ctrl+Page Down and Ctrl+Page Up to move to the next or previous sheet.
Referencing Other Sheets in Formulas
Formulas are not limited to the sheet they are typed on. You can point to a cell on another sheet by writing the sheet name, an exclamation mark, and then the cell address.
Example
=Sheet2!A1
